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GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti comes with a clock speed of 822 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1002 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 384 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

170 Watts

Radeon HD 5870

188 Watts

Difference: 18 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870

153600 MB/sec

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

128256 MB/sec

Difference: 25344 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot (approximately 29%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870

68000 Mtexels/sec

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

52608 Mtexels/sec

Difference: 15392 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870

27200 Mpixels/sec

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

26304 Mpixels/sec

Difference: 896 (3%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Amazon.com

Radeon HD 5870

Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Radeon HD 5870

Manufacturer

nVidia

AMD

Year

January 2011

September 23, 2009

Code Name

GF114

Cypress XT

Fab Process

40 nm

40 nm

Bus

PCIe x16

PCIe 2.1 x16

Memory

1024 MB

1024 MB

Core Speed

822 MHz

850 MHz

Shader Speed

1645 MHz

(N/A) MHz

Memory Speed

1002 MHz (4008 MHz effective)

1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)

Unified Shaders

384

1600(320x5)

Texture Mapping Units

64

80

Render Output Units

32

32

Bus Type

GDDR5

GDDR5

Bus Width

256-bit

256-bit

DirectX Version

DirectX 11

DirectX 11

OpenGL Version

OpenGL 4.1

OpenGL 3.2

Power (Max TDP)

170 watts

188 watts

Shader Model

5.0

5.0

Bandwidth

128256 MB/sec

153600 MB/sec

Texel Rate

52608 Mtexels/sec

68000 Mtexels/sec

Pixel Rate

26304 Mpixels/sec

27200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x.
The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen.
The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.